


blue, the color of our world from far, far away

by mothpoem



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Earth Homecoming, F/M, I love my boy, M/M, allura and keith make an appearance, lance reunites with cuba - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-18 01:37:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15474627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothpoem/pseuds/mothpoem
Summary: “Home,” Lance echoes disbelievingly, as he stares and stares at it.Homeland. Holy site. Mi patria, he thinks, and then fat tears are rolling down his cheeks.





	blue, the color of our world from far, far away

**Author's Note:**

> drabble written for julance to the prompt "earth homecoming" and also the song "hallelujah" by jeff buckley

_"the pictures in his mind arose / and began to breathe / and all the gods in all the worlds /_

_began colliding on a backdrop of blue / blue lips, blue veins / he took a step, but then felt tired /_

_he said, "i'll rest a little while." / but when he tried to walk again / he wasn't a child"_  

**— regina spektor, _blue lips_**

• • •

His knees give out before he’s even made it past Red’s ramp.

Lance slow-crawls the rest of the way down on all fours. Around him, Cuba’s rapturous heat cloys. Closes in. His skin endures it. His skin sings beneath it. He’s wearing his father’s decades-old work jacket and he’s finally on solid ground again. The soil is silk between his fingers; he rakes his nails through it as he shakes and shakes and shakes. _I can’t move,_ he thinks. _I won’t move._

 _Move,_ his body screams.

Under the late afternoon sun, two tentative shadows drift over to him and converge, until they’ve become the same alien silhouette. When Lance looks up into the Havana glare, Keith and Allura are watching him with twin expressions of sympathy. They look sure-footed. Keith, with his overlong hair and his broad shoulders, the shiny skin of his burnscar. Allura with her hair loosened down her back like a cloud, her royal circlet and her Altean markings glowing proudly.

Lance hunches over in the dirt, his face flushing a humiliated red.

“Right, then,” Allura says to Keith. “I’ll take left, you take right?”

Keith’s moving before the words have fully left her mouth. He stoops low, wraps Lance’s right arm around his shoulders, then nods determinedly at Allura as she copies his movements. They both surge to their feet at the same time, till Lance is puppet-limping along with them, towards the little yellow farmhouse in the distance.

“What?” Lance says, baffled. He twists at the neck to throw Red a frenzied look. His metal body glimmers against the Cuban cityscape. “Are you guys doing?”

As if in answer, Red gives a slow bow, then gets comfortable in the soil, for once patient. It’s the sight of his still form, stubbornly leonine under the sun, more than anything else, that makes Lance want to cry. A lump rises in his throat and he chokes back a sob.

“Bringing you home,” Keith answers resolutely. He’s staring straight ahead, at the gravel walkway leading up to Lance’s childhood home. “I’m delivering you to their doorstep if I have to.”

“Seconded,” says Allura, from Lance’s left. “Almost there. Just a few more steps now.”

“Home,” Lance echoes disbelievingly, as he stares and stares at it.

Homeland. Holy site. _Mi patria,_ he thinks, and then fat tears are rolling down his cheeks.

“It’s always you two,” Lance mutters with irritated resignation. He sniffles and shoves his face into his own shoulder, wiping at his wet cheeks with his father’s work jacket.

When he’d imagined his homecoming—and he _had,_ with dreamy preoccupation, constantly and whenever his mind found time to wander—he’d always pictured himself flanked by Hunk and Pidge. He hadn’t allowed himself to consider this. Them. The Altean princess and the half-Galra swordsman.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Keith asks.

“Nothing,” Lance says, as he fists the red leather at the blades of Keith’s back and fingers a lock of Allura’s snow white hair. “Nothing at all.”

Here, he thinks, is where I skinned my knee at nine. And there, that’s where I broke my first leg against the haunch of a wild horse. And over there, beyond the yuca, is where I always imagined getting married, with my whole family lined up against the horizon and weeping jubilantly. And here and here and here is where I wish to kiss the two people currently holding me upright. And here and here and here is where I won’t, where I’ll swallow the swell of my own feelings.

“Here,” says Allura.

“You’re home,” says Keith, with the kind of tiny, treacherous smile that has so often eaten Lance alive. It dawns like the Havana sun. It breaks across his scarred face and the shards of it cut Lance.

“Yeah,” Lance whispers.

He digs his fingers into the flesh at Allura and Keith’s napes as the front door to his childhood home creaks and a woman with dark curls sticks her head out, blue eyes huge with wonder.

Her voice cracks open on his name.

_“Leandro?”_

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/lancearchive)


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